Archives for February 2020

Design and development consultancy thoughtbot launched Purpose-built as a newsletter for non-technical founders, which curated relevant and digestible content from their technical blog. Tori Shaffrey has been their Digital Marketing Manager for almost 2 years. She joined the team just after the newsletter launched, when they realized they needed a permanent resource center where founders could find the articles, videos, and podcasts. She’s been curating and editing Purpose-built, the resource center and the newsletter, ever since. She corresponded with Wonder Shuttle on the user research and design thinking behind Purpose-built, as well as her role in editing the content so it makes sense to their non-technical audience.

Do you focus on specific metrics to measure the success of Purpose-built’s content and communicate it to the company?

Yes! We track several metrics, and there are different ones for the resource center and the monthly newsletter. The resource center lives on the thoughtbot domain, so we track traffic from our header navigation, referral traffic, bounce rate, and how many new opportunities engage with the content. For the newsletter, we monitor open rates and click-through-rates. Most of our audience subscribed organically, so we have a very low unsubscribe rate.

Another great indicator of success happened about six months after Purpose-built launched. We sent out a survey and almost 10% of our audience took it, which is pretty unheard of in our industry. To put that number into perspective: usually, email click-through rates are less than 3% in tech. They voted on potential topics, told us their favorite way to digest content, even commented on the design of the newsletter. This helped with the content roadmap of Purpose-built and showed our team that the audience was getting value from the newsletter.

As Frame.io’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, Ron Dawson worked with senior management to execute the company’s content strategy. As Managing Editor of their blog, the Frame.io Insider, he determined its strategic direction, while managing a small in-house team and their freelance writers and photographers. He told Wonder Shuttle that their goal was “to provide both practical and tactical information for predominantly post-production professionals.” He gave this interview before his departure from the company.

Is the Frame.io Insider a resource for people using Frame.io’s product, or is it covering the industry for a more general filmmaking audience?

If you think about it from a content marketing perspective, our blog is what you would call “a top-of-funnel play.” The audience for it are predominantly in the post-production industry, whether or not they are in the market to sign up for our services, and so it is, by far, one of the largest resources of traffic to the Frame.io website in general.

What really sets our blog apart from the thousand other filmmaking blogs out there is the depth in which we go into our topics. Our blog posts average around 2,500 words, and it’s not uncommon for us to have a post that gets into the 3,000- to 5,000-word range.

One of our top 10 blog posts is actually north of 10,000 words. And one of our top 10 posts is about time code, which is a topic that, on the surface, is about as dry as you can get, but believe it or not, there’s a lot of technical stuff that goes into time code. The more technical our articles are, the better they perform. We have a very technical audience who likes to get into the nitty-gritty, and our blog gives them that meat, so to speak.

John Collins says Intercom had a pretty successful blog when he brought his journalism experience to the company in 2014. As Director of Content, he now manages a team that’s split between two continents and works with Intercom employees around the world. He spoke to Wonder Shuttle about having the content investment come from the top and breaking through the noise of the content marketing industry.

How has Intercom’s content evolved since you joined the company?

I came in with a lot of my background as a journalist, mostly covering tech and business for close to 20 years. I inherited the blog and social media. I added podcasts to that, when it was kind of like, “Oh, will people be interested in a branded podcast?” Slack launched their podcast the same day as we did. It’s almost like the podcast is the new blog these days, but five years ago that wasn’t quite as obvious.

Then I also added gated content. There was definitely an era where almost everything was gated. People would produce a spreadsheet-macro-template thing and it would be like, “Give us your email address, and your mother’s maiden name, and all this information if you want to get it.” And it just didn’t feel like a fair value exchange. 

So we didn’t rush into gated content, we wanted to establish the quality of our content and trust with the people who were reading and using it. We started to do books, which have been huge for us. One of our books is not a 30- or 40-page PDF, it’s a 20,000- to 30,000-word publication. It’s something that we spend probably three to four months working on. It’s got an ISBN number, it’s available in multiple formats, we do print versions. And then we feel like, “Well, OK. To get that, give us an email address and let’s actually start some kind of relationship that hopefully, if there’s a good fit, will end up in you becoming a loyal and happy customer.”

We are a team of 11 now, split between San Francisco and Dublin. In the last year, we’ve started to add more things behind the scenes. We now do a lot of work like sales enablement and supporting campaigns that the broader marketing team would be doing.